Your chances of hitting a deer with your car stand at one in 173 in Colorado, The Gazette reports today.

You can prevent a collision with a deer, moose or elk. Here are some tips from State Farm:

* Be aware of your surroundings. Pay attention to “deer crossing” signs. Scan down the road and far off to each side. At night, use your high-beam lights if possible to illuminate the road’s edges. Be especially watchful in areas near woods and water. If you see one deer, there may be several others nearby.

* Be particularly alert at dusk and dawn when these animals venture out to feed.

* If you see a deer, moose or elk on or near the roadway and think you have time to avoid hitting it, reduce your speed, tap your brakes to warn other drivers and sound your horn. Deer tend to fixate on headlights, so flashing them may cause the animal to move. If there’s no vehicle close behind you, brake hard.

* If a collision seems inevitable, don’t swerve to avoid the animal; your risk of injury may be greater if you do. Maintain control of the vehicle. Report the accident to the police and your insurance company.

* Always obey the speed limit and wear safety belts.

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There was never any question as to whether I or my friends would get our driver’s licenses at 16. The only thing that held us back was getting in those practice hours. Now, before you think I’m getting nostalgic about the good old days, I want to remind you this was back in the day before air bags, when mid-size cars were bigger than today’s big sedans. When I got my license, I would haul four or five other kids to softball practice or the mall. Granted, we didn’t have cell phones to distract us, but imagine six teenage girls in a car together — talk about distracting.

Graduated licensing laws here in Colorado and in other states limit when teens can drive and who they can have in the car with them. The laws have helped lower teen crash rates around the country. But is it enough?

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has released a new report that focuses on the costs in terms of lives of allowing licensure sooner rather than later. The message is that licensing at later ages would substantially reduce crashes involving teen drivers. The same conclusion has been reached in other countries. Teens in Great Britain and most Australian states can’t get their licenses until they turn 17, for example. In most EU countries it’s 18. The Institute’s new report is being released at the annual meeting of the Governors Highway Safety Association.

“This is a tough sell,” says Anne McCartt, Institute senior vice president for research, “but it’s an important enough issue to challenge the silence and at least consider changing the age at which we allow teenagers to get their licenses to drive. After all, graduated licensing has been successful ever since states began to adopt these programs more than a decade ago, and raising the licensing age is a logical next step to reduce driving by the riskiest motorists on the road, the youngest ones.”

I’m sure there are a lot kids in their early to mid-teens out there thinking this is a terrible idea. But there are also probably a lot of parents of those kids worried about putting their child behind the wheel. Whether we license drivers at 16, 17 or even 18, they still need plenty of behind-the-wheel time with an experienced driver before they take off on their own.

“Sixteen-year-old drivers have the highest crash involvement rate of any age group in Colorado and are nearly three times more likely to be involved in a fatal crash than the average of all other drivers,” says COTeenDriver.com. The Web site offers lots of tips for teens and their parents and all the information you need about Colorado’s Graduated Licensing Laws.

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For example, even though Americans rated drunk driving as the most serious traffic safety issue, almost 10 percent  admitted to driving during the previous month when they thought their blood alcohol content was above the legal limit. And while 82 percent rated distracted driving as a serious problem, more than half of those same individuals admitted to talking on the cell phone while driving in the past month, and 14 percent even admitted to reading or sending text messages while driving.

The overall death toll on U.S. roadways has consistently exceeded 40,000 every year since the early 1960s with the sole exception of 1992. With these statistics in mind the aims of the index are simple:
• To investigate the public’s traffic-safety-related knowledge, attitudes, behaviors and experiences.
• To create a baseline measure of traffic safety culture in the U.S.
• To monitor America’s traffic safety culture.
• To guide traffic safety research and public outreach.
• To foster dialogue about traffic safety and how to improve it.

If, as to the report says, three out of four of motorists believe they are more careful than others behind the wheel, who’s doing all the bad driving?

Because I know it’s not one of us, it must be the other guy. But just in case, let’s all try to be a little safer on the roads. Check out some of these traffic safety links at AAA Foundation for more information.

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While the purpose of a bumper is to absorb the energy of a low-speed collision and slow the vehicles before there’s damage to expensive-to-repair parts like fenders and hoods, modern front-end styling results in bumper designs that can either slide under the bumpers of other vehicles or that simply don’t have enough room to absorb the energy of a low-speed crash. What this means is that even a small impact can cost you big when it comes to new small cars.

The Institute’s findings:

The front bumper of the Ford Focus is tall enough to do a reasonably good job in the full-width test. Repairs cost less than $600. In contrast, damage to the Hyundai Elantra of nearly $5,000 in the same test is equal to almost one-third of the car’s sales price.

Underride is a frequent cause of significant damage in the tests, just like in real-world crashes. For example, the front bumpers of the Volkswagen Rabbit and Honda Civic underrode the barrier in the front full-width test resulting in damage to their grilles, hoods, fenders and air-conditioning condensers. Similarly, the Toyota Prius sustained nearly $4,000 damage in the rear full-width test because its bumper is mounted too low to be in position to protect the vehicle’s tailgate, rear body panel and taillights.

In the front corner test of the right side of the Prius, damage was much less, about $1,200, involving the fender and headlight. But had the test been conducted on the left side, the barrier would have crushed a coolant tank which costs more than $1,000 to replace, not including labor.

You can read the full report here.

Photo courtesy of Ford

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The best performers, earning the Institute’s Top Safety Pick award, are:

2009 Ford Escape

2008 Mitsubishi Outlander

2008 Nissan Rogue

2009 Volkswagen Tiguan

These four models earn good ratings in all  three of the Institute’s evaluations. They are equipped with standard electronic stability control and side airbags. The Escape’s ratings also apply to the hybrid version, which is also sold as the Mercury Mariner and Mazda Tribute.

Not performing as well was the two-door Jeep Wrangler in the side-impact tests. Tested without its optional side airbags, the Wrangler earned the lowest rating of poor. One problem was that the driver door opened during the impact. (When side airbags are optional, the Institute’s policy is to test without the option because this is how most of the vehicles will be sold.)

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The bad news is 16- to 24-year-olds still use their seat belts less than any other group — with only 77 percent using them. Usage also remained lower among drivers traveling alone than among those transporting passengers.

With the NHTSA reporting that seat belts prevent 50 percent of potential crash fatalities and save about 15,000 lives each year — not to mention it’s the law in most states — doesn’t it make sense to buckle up every time you get in the car?

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“This is the third Acura and the eighth model from Honda to earn our top award,” says Institute president Adrian Lund. “Frontal crashworthiness has improved dramatically for all cars in recent years, but there still are significant differences in how vehicles perform in our side and rear tests.”

In 2007 the Institute made the criteria to earn Top Safety Pick tougher by adding a requirement — winners must be equipped with electronic stability control. Known by different names and called vehicle stability assist on the TSX, ESC helps drivers maintain control in the worst situation — loss of control at high speed — by engaging automatically when it senses vehicle instability and helping to bring a vehicle back in the intended line of travel. ESC lowers the risk of a fatal single-vehicle crash by about half. It lowers the risk of a fatal rollover crash by as much as 80 percent.

“You don’t know what kind of crash you’re going to be in,” Lund says, “so it’s important to choose a vehicle that will protect you in all kinds of crashes.”

You can read the full story at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Web site.

The Acura TSX sports a 16-valve, DOHC, 2.4-liter, i-VTEC inline four-cylinder, pumping out 201 horsepower and 172 pound-feet of torque. EPA mileage estimates are 21 miles per gallon city and 30 mpg highway. Its starting price is $28,960.

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Phone bans for young drivers are becoming commonplace as concerns mount about the contribution of distractions to teens’ elevated crash risk. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia restrict both hand-held and hands-free phone use by young drivers. Six states and DC bar all drivers from using hand-helds. For a state-by-state list of cellphone laws, visit www.iihs.org/laws/cellphonelaws.aspx.

If you look at that state-by-state list, you’ll see that some states have cellphone bans for all drivers — not just teens. And Utah’s law defines careless driving as committing a moving violation (other than speeding) while distracted by the use of a hand-held cellphone or other activities not related to driving.

Colorado’s Graduated Licensing Law prohibits teens with a learning permit from talking on a cellphone while driving. While Colorado’s law doesn’t prohibit teens from using their cellphones while driving, parents might want to. Teens need fewer distractions when they drive, not more.

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Preliminary data shows the number of unbelted drivers and passengers who died on Colorado roadways dropped to an all-time low in 2007, credited in large part to ducation and high-visibility enforcement of the state’s seat belt laws, according to a press release from the Colorado Department of Transportation.

Last year, 206 people were killed in crashes who were not buckled up, out of a total of 89 drivers and passengers who died. The percentage of unrestrained occupants killed was also the lowest on record at 53 percent. By comparison, in 2002 — the first year of “Click It or Ticket” enforcement in Colorado — 380 people died unbuckled, representing 67 percent of the total number of drivers and passengers killed

“Wearing your seatbelt costs you nothing,” said James F. Ports, Jr., Deputy administrator, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the press release.

He’s right, and it doesn’t take long to buckle up and make sure your passengers are buckled up, as well. There are plenty of excuses for not wearing a seat belt: It’s uncomfortable, it wrinkles my clothes, it’s not cool. The fact that seat belts save lives should silence those excuses. But because it doesn’t, the “Click It or Ticket” campaign aims to get more people buckled up.

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“The big question from consumers is, ‘How safe is it?’”, says Institute president Adrian Lund. “All things being equal in safety, bigger and heavier is always better. But among the smallest cars, the engineers of the Smart did their homework and designed a high level of safety into a very small package.”

To read the full review and watch a video of IIHS’s tests, click here.

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